tim's experiment

The nice thing about the print edition of the Post, as I fear I have said before, is that when really infuriated you can fling it on the ground and jump up and down on it. You can’t do that with an iPad. My ire yesterday was aroused by a piece on the housing crisis, which advanced the daringly contrarian view that no crisis existed. This will be news to people living in crowded and sordid places. One expects to find that it has been written by someone who does not himself live in a crowded and sordid place. Sure enough the author is one Ian Brownlee, who is the managing director of a firm of “planning consultants”. Not written from a squatter hut, then.

Mr Brownlee takes the official figure of 105,600 households “inadequately housed” and maintains that it is too large. It is interesting to see how this trick is performed.

Firstly Mr Brownlee accepts as beyond dispute that all residents in public housing are “adequately housed”. This is an ambiguous concept, of course. Does adequately mean safely sheltered from rain or wind, with access to a toilet somewhere. Or does it mean the sort of place in which we can imagine Mr Brownlee himself feeling comfortable? Look at it this way. If you take the footbridge from the Lucky Plaza podium roughly Northeast you will get a good look at Lek Yuen Estate, and in particular at a few units which have been left empty because they are unacceptably close to the flow of passing pedestrians. So you can see the amount of space which our local housing chiefs think is “adequate” as a family home. It is about the size of my car port. Public housing dwellers in North Lancashire might allocate this much space to their whippets. The public housing in which I spent my youth was built in the early 50s in a period of post-war austerity. It was, nevertheless, a house, with living and dining rooms downstairs, along with kitchen, small toilet and space outside for the dustbin and coal store. Upstairs there were three bedrooms and a bathroom. This was not luxurious. Heating was provided only by an open fire in the living room and there were no arrangements for a car at all. The history of Hong Kong public housing is a story of ferocious parsimony, reflected in tiny flats, lifts which stop only on selected floors, no gardens, no dogs … The oddities resulting include the fact that most Hong Kong people never entertain at home (the flat is already full) and many schoolchildren do their homework in public places (the flat is effectively one room). Hong Kong public housing flats rarely feature in Hong Kong films, because by the time you get the producer, director, cameraman, sound man, continuity person, lighting wizard and prop wrangler into the flat … there is no room for actors.

The point I am trying to make is that whether a public housing dweller is “adequately” housed depends on how many people are living in the same flat. As well as the well-publicized cases of “rich tenants” there are also less well-publicized cases of desperate overcrowding. It is misleading to imply that anyone in public housing must ipso facto be considered to have no unmet housing needs.

Now we get to private housing. Mr Brownlee notes that the official line is rather confusing: “not all people in inadequate housing are necessarily inadequately housed,” according to the Long Term Housing Strategy. Confusing indeed. But Mr Brownlee is not exactly a model of clarity himself. He starts going through the official list of the “inadequately housed”. The first is those living in “temporary structures, huts or illegal rooftops”. Wait, says Mr Brownlee. These are made of wood and tin sheet. But these are acceptable building materials in Canada and New Zealand. Therefor these people are not necessarily inadequately housed. Note the interesting logical structure here. You may feel that an igloo in Hong Kong is a poor long-term housing investment but packed snow is an acceptable building material in Canada so you can stop complaining.

Then we come to people living in converted industrial buildings. Again in other cities “loft-style” accommodation is common and accepted so we should accept it here. Indeed Mr Brownlee claims to know of many “unauthorised” high-end loft apartments in Hong Kong. I find this difficult to believe. I am sure many people would be happy to convert part of a factory building into a luxurious “loft-style” apartment. I would quite like to have a go myself. But the idea that large number of people have undertaken this expensive process on an “unauthorised” basis, meaning they can be thrown out at the drop of a Land Office pen, is a bit difficult to swallow. Mr Brownlee notes that such conversions would be feasible in Hong Kong “if fire safety requirements could be met” but the reason why these dwellings are automatically classified as “inadequate” is because the fire safety requirements are not met. People are living in death traps.

Then we come to people living in shared accommodation. The line will now be becoming familiar: in other countries shared accommodation is accepted for “people at a certain stage of their lives” so we should not classify such people as inadequately housed. But we are not comparing like with like here. Shared accommodation is acceptable for people like students, who want something cheap and temporary which is not a home, but as a permanent arrangement for a family it is questionable. If it is affordable the space is going to be tight. If people are desperate they are not going to pick their flatmates. It’s a recipe for misery.

Mr Brownlee now turns to subdivided flats. Curiously we are not offered any international comparisons on this topic, and he concedes that there are “situations in which the physical conditions in these units are not acceptable”. But there are also, mirabile dictu, “good standard subdivided flats that accommodate people who prefer this form of affordable housing to other options”. I think this is hogwash. Mr Brownlee should have been required to provide a few examples before his piece was printed. The majority, the vast majority of subdivided flats are dangerous, squalid and overcrowded. People who prefer them to “other options” are the people whose other options comprise the local fly-overs.

Mr Brownlee notes with approval the government’s line that all other people in private housing are “adequately housed” and notes triumphantly that even the government’s figures (which he disputes as too pessimistic) show that 95 per cent of the population is “adequately housed”. Therefor there is no housing crisis. Actually I rather agree with Mr Brownlee’s further conclusion, which is that the government should not panic and should not reallocate land properly reserved for other uses, but should build properly planned new towns. But there is no reason why proper planning should not be done urgently and attempts to stir up complacency are a public disservice.

What people think is adequate housing will of course change over time. What was an accceptable alternative to a squatter village in the 1950s will be regarded as an insulting suggestion now. Many Hong Kong people have traveled overseas and have seen for themselves that houses in Canada and New Zealand may be built with the same materials as temporary structures here but they are built on a much more spacious scale. It is no longer regarded as a privilege to have three generations of the family sharing 600 square feet. Hong Kong housing is by international standards indecently crowded and outrageously over-priced. Quibbling over definitions to magic the problem away is not going to help.